Forward deployed engineers: they find where AI transforms your business and build it inside your team | yaab
Service · forward deployed engineers

Forward deployed engineers.They find where AI transforms your business, and build it inside your team.

Senior engineers of ours who map where AI brings a measurable result in your product, your operation and your delivery.

forward deployed engineer, in your team
What it is

What a forward deployed engineer is.

One owner of one problem, for SaaS teams and IT departments with systems of their own.

Starts in your operation

Not in your backlog or a ticket queue. They learn how your work runs before deciding what to build.

Writes the specification with you

A specification (what the change must do and how to check it), written with your people before any code.

Accountable in production

They own it from the first conversation to the system running, and operate it in production. It ends as a documented, tested system your team operates.

Discovery

First, find where AI transforms the business.

Your forward deployed engineer runs discovery: a working week with your team, not a slide deck.

What they look at: high-volume work that follows a pattern, the data that exists, what counts as correct, and what an error costs each way.

What they look for: work your team does by hand that the factory or an agent could take over.

You leave with a map of where AI brings a measurable result, ranked by result and by what it takes to get there.

The unit

The pod: one small team per problem.

The pod is what you hire, month to month, working through the factory, an agent, or both.

One forward deployed engineer, inside your team: your channels, your repository, your standups.

One deployment strategist, a senior lead shared with other clients. They set up the factory on your architecture, keep it tuned, and carry what one engagement learns to the next.

The factory, or the agent, running on your repository and your CI: AI-generated code, tests, and an independent check that did not write the code.

An engineer on your team, or ours, approves every change before it is merged.
A second pod starts when the discovery map shows the next problem is worth it.
The people

Who our forward deployed engineers are.

Senior engineers

They built production systems for years before AI, so their review of every change comes from experience.

Used to directing AI

Writing code by hand is the exception. They direct the AI daily and know when to reject what it produced.

Fluent in your business

They read a process, a queue and a margin, and tell you where AI will not bring a measurable result.

Proven on unfamiliar code

They make changes that pass the tests of a large codebase they did not write.

Client-facing

They explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and disagree when that is the right call.

Roadmap

How the work starts, week by week.

01

Diagnose, week 1.

A 45-minute working session, then a discovery week with your forward deployed engineer inside your team. Together we write three specifications from the discovery map, each with its observable result defined.

02

Prove, the pilot.

Factory, weeks 2 to 4: the three specs become pull requests your team approves. Agents, weeks 2 to 7: one agent on a real queue, accuracy measured on your cases.

03

Scale, month to month.

The pod keeps working inside your team. The map is updated as results come in, and you decide the next problem, or whether to stop.

What we measure in week 1

Your current numbers, before anything changes.

We take them in the first week. Every month after is measured against them.

The pilot is invoiced when your team approves its pull requests, or when its agent reaches the accuracy target agreed with you.
We work in time zones aligned with your working day. Your forward deployed engineer joins your standups in the first week.
Ownership

What you get, and what stays yours.

The system running in production.

The AI map of your operation: what to build next, in what order, and why.

The specification and the tests that prove it, running in your CI.

The code and the repository, including history.

The IP. No license back to us and no runtime dependency on anything of ours.

The engineering brain: a record of every decision, rule and test, connected and kept in your repository, so whoever continues the work starts with context.

If you later build a Company Brain, one connected record of how your company works, this is already part of it.

Done means: the observable result defined in the working session, measured.

Bring the problem.

One 45-minute working session: we map where AI brings a measurable result, write the first specifications with you, and define the observable result.

We reply within one business day.